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CONGRESS TO HOLD CLOSED HEARINGS ON ACCUSED SPY ROBERT HANSSEN LATER THIS WEEK

ANN CURRY, anchor:

Congress holds a closed hearing later this week in the case of accused spy
Robert Hanssen. This, as new details emerge on just how much damage he may
have done. NBC's Pete Williams now.

PETE WILLIAMS reporting:

American intelligence officials tell NBC News that the biggest secrets betrayed
by Robert Hanssen involve a supersensitive operation headquartered in suburban
Washington, called the Special Collections Service. Its job, say intelligence
experts, to get inside foreign government
agencies overseas and bug telephones and computers as close to the sources as
possible before those lines can be encrypted, making them much harder to
intercept.

Mr.
JOHN PIKE (Intelligence Expert): The Special Collections Service is sort of like
America's
"mission impossible" force. They do exactly that sort of close surveillance, burglary,
wiretapping, breaking and entering.

WILLIAMS: Analysts say revealing the technical details of how that's done, as
the FBI now claims Hanssen did, would limit the ability of the US to gather
intelligence from existing secret sources. The program is so secret that when
the FBI revealed the charges against Hanssen, it described the Special
Collections
Service only in general terms, as a program of enormous value, expense, and
importance to the US government. And new details out now about Robert Hanssen
himself, seen here in this home video taken at the wedding of this journalist
and author, James Bamford, who says he became
friends with Hanssen nearly 10 years ago, inviting him out for trips on
Bamford's boat, and to his wedding almost five years ago. Bamford recalls how
eager Hanssen was to know every detail of an interview he did in the mid-'90s
in Russia with Viktor Cherkashin,
a former top Russian spy and the man the FBI now says was one of Hanssen's top
handlers. 'Maybe,' Bamford now says, 'Hanssen was eager to know if the Russian
let slip anything about spies in the FBI.'

Mr. JAMES BAMFORD (Author,
"Body of Secrets"): I
think he had a couple of interests. One of them was--one was sort of a warning
sign to see if Cherkashin might have said anything that might tip off somebody
to him.

WILLIAMS: But he says Hanssen was so deeply religious and such an outspoken
anti-Communist, Bamford never dreamed he might be a
spy.

Mr. BAMFORD: Because I've spent my career looking into the intelligence
community and people in the intelligence community, and he was just not on my
list of possible Russian suspects.

WILLIAMS: FBI officials say when they got KGB files listing a spy only by code
name, they became convinced it was Hanssen when they found his fingerprints on
some of the documents. For TODAY, Pete Williams, NBC News, Washington.